Playing through the latest pre-alpha, and having a blast. I set the game on the new hardcore setting and am quite impressed by how smooth it is going, my compliments to the devs for paying such meticulous attention to all the tiny details as everything is working well. Two observations I have at the moment are not bugs or glitches, rather it is about two instances I have encountered where the game-play feels a bit off. The first regards scanning tech. I like what has been done, but… at one point, the Draguul and I were both in the same system, it just didn’t seem right, (even with basic scanning tech), that I would not have information on the composition of their fleet. I know it’s a minor point, but in such instances it may be worth it to give the player some basic info. The second observation is with ship class and name. It seems the class is only depicted once a ship is upgraded. Take a look at the screenshot attached. Both the “Kite” and “Hawk” are the same class. However, the Kite was upgraded to a Frigate+ while the Hawk was an original build of that class. As you can see, only the Upgrades depict ship class… which is turning out a bit problematic for another reason. I just upgraded a ship, the TSS Anaconda, and now I have three lines of text inside that tiny box… I know it’s a minor point but it’s getting a bit confusing and distracting. Perhaps either just the name being depicted or using naval-type abreviations (FF, DD, CA, BB, TN) should be considered. Well, as I said, these are really minor things so I understand if they are left as is, the meat and potatoes of the game is outstanding thus far!
+1 on ship classes. I have never understood why games designers do not use the standard military naval abbreviations. It seems like the obvious thing to do. Establishing this naming convention is the first thing I do in all of my games. It would be great if the game came with these already implemented, relieving me of the time consuming task of establishing order in every game. I usually have two or three types of each class, depending on their role. Seems like this would be a simple thing to implement and would put the game ahead of all of its competitors in this minor but useful area.
I may be wrong, but I think in a lot of cases, they actually don't know these abbreviations/terminology. Sometimes it may even be a conscious decision. I've also played many games where the devs got the sequence wrong, for example, they would have a Corvette listed as a larger hull than a Destroyer when it is actually two sizes smaller. In MoO2, I did away with it all, FFs became Gunboats DDs became Corvettes CAs became Frigates BBs became Destroyers etc. This by the way, (the designations) is not much of an issue to most players, it only hampers the immersion of the player that is well versed in such matters, or the player who likes a certain type of symmetry and order in this area. In the post above, I was focusing more on the fact that the behavior of the function was not acting in a logical manner and only showing the "class" of a hull if it was upgraded. A minor point really.
We'll have a look at that. One could think that you couldn't see the enemy's fleet composition without the required scanning tech, even when in the same system. When the combat starts (in the combat alert panel, when you attack or the enemy) it's another story, because the engagement is imminent, and you know who is coming at you at that point. We'll think about this. What you see in "Frigate+ (TSS Kite)" is the "ship design" name you gave the upgraded version (not the class), plus the old name you explicitely had set to that ship. It was brought up before that it would be preferable to show the new "ship design" name after refitting a ship and to not keep the explicit old name the ship may had. So, what we did was the best of both worlds, we hoped, which was to rename the ship upon refit to show the new "ship design" name, plus keeping the old explicit name (if any) in parentheses. If no explicit name was given to the ship, we just show the new ship design name. This is a bit tricky and there's so much you can fit in that tiny space. So, we must figure out what do we want to see in the ship name text. And, I suspect we will not come up with a solution that will please everybody, but we may try. Options: a) Always show the current "ship design" name, except in the case where one has set an explicit name for the ship, for which the old name is lost and the ship will just display the new explicit name, irrespective if the ship is refitted or not (in your "Frigate+ (TSS Kite)" example it would display "TSS Kite" even after the refit). In other words, when a ship refit is done, the old name is kept if it was explicitely set, or it changes to the new ship design otherwise. This was the old approach, pre-PA10. b) Upon discussion we decided to always show the current "ship design" name for all ships, except for the case where the ship had an explicit name set, for which we now append the explicit name between parentheses, after the "ship design" name, upon refit. This is the current approach. In your "Frigate+ (TSS Kite)" what happened is that you set an explicit name "TSS Kite" and then refitted the ship to the "Frigate+" ship design. The result was "Frigate+ (TSS Kite)". c) We could always just show the current "ship design" name of the ship, period. You could still set an explicit name, and that would be the new ship name. However, after a refit, the explicit name would be lost and the new name of the ship would just be the new "ship design" name (in your "Frigate+ (TSS Kite)" example, it would just display "Frigate+" after the refit). You could still rename the ship again to whatever you want, of course. This is how MoO2 does it, by the way. Let us know what option you prefer, from these 3 or other you may have, and we'll consider it.
This is most logical, as long as the class displays in the in-depth description (by hovering over the ship), it would appear more uniform. It would also remove the crowded wording that appears in cases where the name is long enough that a third line of text appears, it seems much that. But really, it's very very minor.
This seems dependent on how good the initial built-in scanner tech is supposed to be. Two fleets could be in the same system but still very far away from each other.
Without a doubt, but leaving real science aside for a while, whereby just the engines of those ships would make them detectable from Alpha Centauri (if they were in our system), I'm looking at it from strictly a game-play point of view. What would "feel" better? Should you still be limited in the same system as you are light years away? what would be more fun to the player? Realistically, I can live with both, but my preference would be that ships in the same system would gain basic knowledge such as how many (at the very least) and what class (at the most). Another alternative could be, "un-identified fleet consists of between 3-6 ships" Just feels like there should be a little more here than a complete lack of intel. Now moving along, here’s another small observation. I’m running a campaign on hardcore, and after a while I put myself in a position to attack. I built some Cruisers, they have a single heavy mount, auto-fire Particle accelerator, a single battery of Polaris missiles, a bomb rack, and an auto-fire PD laser. I took these babies, (accompanied by some smaller ships) to three battles on the same turn. Now I don’t know if this is deliberate or not, but here is the thing. I faced off against FFs and DDs, each of my fleets was commanded by a hero, (Ruiz, Olken and Yang) At range, my particle accelerator had a 1% chance to hit, moving closer, and against the DD, that increased to 5%. This is too extreme, may as well not have had any weapon at all with those numbers. I considered scrapping the game as I would never willingly outfit my flagships with in-effective weapons but… I have over 200 turns invested already. So I decided I would just give the AI another bonus and keep the ships I have. So I am wondering, is this correct? 1-5% seems over the top.
It all comes down to the Ship Attack bonus you have and the Ship Defense your opponent has. Frigates and Destroyers enjoy from SD intrinsic bonuses, so they will be harder to hit. The rule of thumb is this. Right next to each other, if both the SA of the attacker and the SD of the defender are equal, the chance to hit will be 50%. Distance decreases chance to hit for beams and kinetics. So, the further you are, the least your chance to hit will be. Kinetics (your particle accelerator), are less accurate than beams, but they don't get damage reduction by range, like beams do. So, they are more suited for close combat. The trade off with kinetics is that you should get to a closer range to get the full benefit, and to offset the intrinsic hit penalty they have. There are many ways to increase Ship Attack bonuses, and in turn your chance to hit: - better targetting algorithms, leaders with better attack skill, better crew experience, battle sensors special system with better scanning tech, having a battle station or star fortress (if you're defending), having airspace defense buildings (if you're defending). We'll also have Ship Attack and Ship Defense modifiers for the races (to be implemented). A new weapon modification also not implemented yet (Continous) will also boost accuracy. At the beginning it's harder to hit ships, and kinetics may not be the best weapon if you want to attack at a distance. If you're near however, hitting your opponent may be devastating. There are exceptions though: the Railgun has only half range penalty to accuracy, Wurzite cannon doubles it while Gauss-Coil Gun has no range to accuracy penalty. Some beam weapons also have specificities regarding range to hit and damage lost to range dissipation. Let's keep checking this to see if it's over the top or not. There are ways to boost that Ship Attack, I suggest we explore them and then we can report back and discuss. Also this: Weapon modifications increase the space they take considerably. That cruiser of yours has very few weapons. A single kinetic weapon, a single missile launcher and a single PD. It even has a bomb rack special system. What this means is that that cruiser will not be very good offensively. Yes, the modifications are powerful, when they hit! I suggest you try going with more weapons and reduce a bit the number of modifications, otherwise you may end up with powerful weapons indeed, but that are too few and that will miss too much. And, by the way, your particle accelerator had Auto-fire which reduces accuracy by 20%.
Yep, I know, it's meant to be more of a "bomber" than an effective Cruiser, it's escorted by a DD and 2FF... you'll read all about it soon... I understand all the factors that can come into play, at least on a theoretical level, it just seemed that at 1%... well maybe a cap on how low it can get would be helpful. Look at it this way, 1% means you will miss 99 out of 100 times, statistically, in reality, you will always miss. The Cruiser commanded by Ruiz, (a very good leader) and with a regular crew, closed with an enemy Destroyer (thereby reducing the range penalty) and only managed a 5% to hit probability. Now, as I stated, I am keeping these ships and will use them throughout the campaign, so expect some more info as I see their behaviour change. But regardless of that, I really think a cap should be in place to avoid that situations where a weapon is useless. Even a 10% percent "guarantee" to hit, would mean entire battles where the weapon would never be effective. Just the visuals and impression a player would get when seeing that 1% is distasteful, and offers nothing positive to ISG that I can readily see. Please, keep an open mind as we move forward and consider a cap on how "bad" a weapon can be. It doesn't need to be drastic and shouldn't be, (otherwise the benefits of other factors and tech becomes diminished), but 1%? I feel that is kind of harsh
That's the issue perhaps, seeing the 1%, not being. I'll bet that if you didn't see it you'd not be bothered about missing that much. There's some configurations that will simply not work against the type of enemies you're up against, and the tactical situation involved. You were not bothered by it in MoO2 and neither was I, and we know how much weapons failed to hit in that game, especially at the beginning. Why? Because we didn't know the "to hit" chance, we were not shown the odds. But I can assure you that you had lots of 1% and 0% in that game. This was masked by the sheer number of weapons one went with (3,4,....8 weapons in each bank), which caused at least a couple to hit, so we got the impression that all of them hit, but that was not really the case. I do have an open mind and it's a valid point you make, that seeing 1% there is not a pleasant feeling, especially since it comes as a surprise. However, it's the result of the current model and of the player ship configurations. Perhaps the problem is before the fact, when at ship design, if the players knew the odds they were facing, perhaps it would be better in assisting in what the right configurations would be. We could show <5% or some other arbitrary number just to avoid the 0% and 1%'s, but other than that it's too risky to change the model at this point just because a single heavy-mount auto-fire cannon fails a lot. We need more data. \Edit: I assure you that that single heavy-mount auto-fire cannon will do a lot of a damage on a Titan, or even a Battleship, i.e. it will have a much greater chance to hit (because the titan has a much poorer SD value, -40% intinsic SD than FR to be exact).
I tend to agree with this, perhaps this is the issue, the psychological impression one gets... Oh yeah, and against bases or monsters! I rather like that, <5% or even <10% would be far more palatable I think. I too agree that it is too risky to tinker with the model at this point, too many things are working well and I would be loath to risk that as well. In either case, I will be using these ships long enough, (I hope), to get more information. Let's see what happens as the crews gain experience and they start to target those nasty Battleships I am detecting massing at my borders.
It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of “forced” ship limits, but I do understand the need to keep forces small in a TBS 4x game offering manual combat. Yesterday, I learned something that had escaped me, even with the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on ISG. Going over your SSP limit, not only incurs a financial penalty, but your offensive and defensive capabilities receive a penalty as well as your ship production. To be honest, I don’t see the logic here. I mean why would the gunnery crews of a ship on my border be affected by my having gone over the SSP limits? You could say it is a lack of trained personnel, but I scoff at that. Am I to believe that in my empire which consists of close to 30 billion people, I’m having a hard time finding trained crews for less than two dozen ships? But let us leave this aside for a moment, take a look here, it is past 200 turns and I field 36 SSP worth of ships while only having the capacity for 31, I am over the limit. Now the thing is, this is the natural progression of this particular session. I neither rushed or delayed building ships, and as you can see I did build a few colony ships, outpost ships, etc during this time span. Now I am over the limit and it is crippling my fleet, what to do? I could scrap some ships… but why would I want to? I would lose the valuable experience of the crews by doing that and gain more money for my already bloated treasury with little to spend it on I could increase my SSP limit, but as you can see, I am already doing that, it will take time. Perhaps I could have never built them in the first place… but that is not what the flow of the game dictated, this session is on hardcore and my forces are pretty weak as is. Now everybody whines and bitches about something they don’t like from time to time, (and I suppose that is what I am doing now), but I want to take it a step further. I want to offer a compromise solution. Instead of scrapping, why can’t I simply de-activate some ships? In that case there would be no SSP cost but I could see a monetary cost being attached (thereby putting some of those abundant credits to good use). This would be tied into star bases, meaning a player could only de-activate or re-activate there, perhaps even a base module would be needed to keep ships in a moth-ball state. Finally, about having played the game and not knowing the full penalty involved. ISG is really deep and complex, if you were to take all the tooltips, text and info available, it would be a novel. This means that a full manual would be huge… and probably never read. A tutorial would help but the chance of some information being overlooked by the player remains high. Perhaps then, certain key information could be relayed to the player via an “advisor”, obviously the key to this would be insuring that this advisor does not pop up too often and break the flow of the game. Anyway gents, I think the game is great, I can play it as is and enjoy it, but there is nothing wrong with tuning it up even further.
Regarding the complexity, we'll have a tutorial, and a hint-based system, like an "advisor" that will pop-up from time to time when the situation calls for it. We're even going to allow the player to tune the amount of pop-ups it gets. This shall be available when we enter Steam Early Access. Regarding the SSPs, you can go under and still field a huge fleet. You just need a ton of money to do that. However, the idea is that you will not be able to go under without some effective consequence, otherwise ship spam will be very hard to avoid, case being the loss in combat efficiency (ship attack and ship defense) and a compromised ship production capacity. Remember that the AI plays by the same rules, so they will have to deal with the negative SSPs as well. Regarding on what to do about it, you can build more orbital stations (battle stations give +4 SSP while star fortresses +6 each), you could invest in ship support infrastruture perks, and level up your leaders Operational skills. Even scrap a ship or two if you have to. We're still thinking in having an additional empire improvement to boost SSPs, in case we feel we need one more option here. So, if you want to go military, then you really have to invest in that part of the game. We are strong advocates of the "can't have it all" approach, and we'll push that as much as we can, within reason of course, and when we feel it doesn't hurt the experience in a general sense. Regarding putting ships in moth-ball, in reserve, that is a feature that is already in the backlog to be analysed when/if the time comes for it. So far we haven't found a clear need for it, and to have to deal with its consequences, which are still unclear what those would be at this point. However, if the lack of SSP starts to become an issue we may have to take that into consideration. I understand the SSPs are a limiting resource, and it's like that by design. Personaly, I still think there are viable ways to get around the lack of SSP, but we'll see. I'm glad you're enjoying the game in Hardcore Looking forward to know the following chapters of your "Terra Invicta (Diary of a madman)" AAR. Now it gets interesting And, I'm also looking forward to read other people's AARs!
Alas, I'm playing the character as a highly Xenophobic man sliding towards insanity... as such I have turned away Alien leaders and limited myself there. No worries, old Gaius has something up his sleeve (Murhahaha), tune in tonight to see his "solution"
Some good things I noticed in my recent campaign The AI, (Moltar in particular) is fielding some good ships, nice weaponry and well shielded The AI is making good use of missile tech as opposed to previous version The AI (Moltar again) almost brought down one of my Cruisers by concentrating firepower on it. (keep in mind, they had only 2FFs against one of my standard battle groups 1CA, 1DD, 2FF) These are good steps towards achieving an AI that is effective at the tactical level.
Yes, previously the AI was neglecting a bit the shield technology. They do a better job at that now. Missiles now come earlier in the tech tree, so the AI will tend to pick those a bit more than before. Also, missiles do more damage than in previous versions. This should be their baseline. The AI does focus their firepower. Nice to hear that 2 FFs did well against a Cruiser.
As interesting observation. 214 turns in, and the Draguul have yet to research Terran colonization. How do I know? They have a Terran world in their home system and a colony ship that has been there for a while, yet they have not colonized that world. I've also been to other systems of theirs where Terran worlds were not colonized. As this is a tolerable biome, I would think they would have researched this. Perhaps if they had, they would have been more formidable? Let me know if you need a save to look at.
I've checked the save. The Draguul did research Terran colonization. That particular Terran world in Lau was not the top priority. Inspecting the AI brain I see that the Draguul wanted to re-colonize Reclusia II, the one you just nuked a few turns before. However, the colony ship did not depart because it didn't have enough escorts to do so because ships were being prioritized for war. After you showed up at Lau, that Colony escaped to Truac. In time, I believe it would try to get an escort to finally attempt to re-colonize Reclusia II. If any can be spared. Reclusia II isn't a great spot, one might say. In fact, perhaps the AI should have just colonized the Terran world in Lau. Closer to home, large. That Terran does have only Medium-G though, but Reclusia II is LowG (It's Ideal, and the Terran world is only Tolerable). Reclusia II is tiny though. This sort of thing is to be expected at this stage. The AI does an acceptable job at colonization, and it will only do so when the right conditions are met (has escorts available, the target has good potential, etc). However, it can be optimized, and it will be in the near future. Thanks for the report, and the save. PS: The Draguul seem to be pretty much done. Let's see what the Moltar are able to do. I've peeked at their game and while they aren't as much of a powerhouse as you, they still seem to have a card or two in their sleeve
